Strength 1st.

This is the time of the year when I get a lot of parents inquiring about “speed & agility” training for their athletes.

I often struggle with what to say to these people because from a marketing and business prospective you don’t want to turn business away or scare prospective customers away so we are taught to “sell them what they want and give them what they need”… Lately, I tell people this is when we speed train however, you should really be doing this strength and jump training in addition or maybe even instead.

What I have found is that most people that are shopping around for speed and agility training have never had any formal coaching or training in strength… because of this the athlete probably lacks in most basic strength pre-requisites that would make speed training actually effective.

If you want to really have a bad day spend a few hours trying to “speed train” a kid that has very little force producing capacity and inter/intra muscular coordination. (the things that strength training develops)

Of course there is always the argument that if strength was actually important powerlifters would be 100 meter runners. Obviously, these people are misguided and there is a lot more than just strength that goes into making super fast athletes. Also, on the other hand I have found is there are some super freaks that are born to be fast and can get away with no formal strength development up to a certain level and then there are the rest (99.9% of us) that need training to find there genetic speed potential.

So, to me this all comes down to how much time does the athlete have and what season is it for them….

For newer mostly untrained athletes anything 3 hours or less per week I say focus on strength and jumping. Produce more force and produce force faster.

If they have more time than that than start adding a speed session in…

We offer our speed sessions in between strength session so that kids can come and do both on the same day… but now were looking at 4 hours per week just all in 2 days….